The Washington Independent » Civil War Raging in Right-Wing Blogosphere
Or how the alliance between Little Green Footballs and its numerous offspring of mostly Christian (and sometimes Jewish), right-wing, anti-Muslim blogs have fallen out since the Bush administration ended. I haven’t read many of them very often recently because they are very difficult to debate with as they are so closed-minded (much the same can be said of the commenters at Harry’s Place, although the actual regular posters are more reasonable), but there is some schadenfreude in watching these bigots fall out with each other, with Charles Johnson of LGF accusing the Christian sites’ owners of rubbing shoulders with European fascists, while the latter accuse Johnson, who designed at least one of their websites, of having gone mad in the last year, of being a control freak and banning anyone who disagrees with him.
However, the strain in relations between LGF and some of the conservative offshoots have been showing since before Obama - I first noticed a split after the Schiavo affair, in which Discarded Lies (originally LGF Watch Watch) joined a whole list of “blogs for Terri” which supported keeping her on life support, while Johnson favoured the “scientific” view that she was brain dead and that turning the support off was justified. Discarded Lies then had a design produced by LGF (a vastly superior design to their present one, it has to be said). Johnson’s background tells you much of what you need to know about the split - he was basically a Californian liberal who spent the 1980s as a session player in LA and writing software for the Atari ST, who radically changed some aspects of his politics as a result of 9/11. It is likely that he regarded the “war on terror” as a liberal project.
The groups in Europe that Johnson characterises as fascists are basically bigoted, reactionary minority parties, some of them with a regionalist agenda (e.g. Vlaams Belang). They generally regard Christianity as central to European identity. Whether they are fascist is a matter of opinion, given that the nature of fascism varied from country to country when it was in power, but most have their roots in fascism (as with the BNP) and some have very close connections to fascism (as with VB), the exception being the Dutch Islamophobes around Geert Wilders, who are liberal fundamentalists. The only thing the European bigots ever had in common with Johnson is hostility to Islam, and even that was from a completely different perspective. Much as with the alliance between the London wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Socialist Workers’ Party here in the UK, the alliance was bound to break down as soon as its moment had passed, although the Stop the War Coalition persists even while RESPECT has broken down.
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As’salamu Aleikum,
You should also add the link (& reference) to Ron Paul’s true face. I never had problems understanding Fascists, Zionists and Nazis and infact I do read their blogs and books, but I had great difficulties at the beginning with Libertarians. They pretend to support oppressed people abroad (eg.Palestine) but when you start to talk to them when it comes to their own country — they see no problem and favour ghettoization of different ethnic groups, and those I have debated with they believe racial biology and how the West used to be better in the Monroe doctrine era. They are not religious either.
The fact that Charles Johnson of LGF now suddenly discovered that they are all “violent” and are in bed with the ideas of ethnically cleansing Muslims from Europe does not convince me unless he lacks insight and fortitude. Him and his friends have been spewing hatred on the internet for over a decade and I guess it is a matter of time before they turned on each other.
The reasons why white supremacists and people of Jewish origins(jihadwatch.org is an example) united against Muslims began recently because of subjective “shared values” in the ideals of “excellency” in knowledge and education, economic “supremacy” etc.
I wonder if other nations do not have similar aspirations, and why they believe themselves to be the only ones?
I have hard of “Western Civilisation”, has there ever been “Jewish Civilisation” or they are now suppose to be one of the same?
The term “Western Civilisation” never been used before very late 19th century, and you can’t find it from ancient Egyptian; Islamic, Greek, Chinese sources; non so ever. It’s a big fat lie.
Gess,
AFAIK libertarians oppose imperialism not out of sympathy for its victims abroad, but because it leads to an (undesirable in their view) increase in the power of the government at home.
“I have hard of “Western Civilisation”, has there ever been “Jewish Civilisation” or they are now suppose to be one of the same?” Well, western civilisation as it developed after the Enlightenment is actually mainly Scottish-Jewish civilisation. The Scots- Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson for example- started it and the jews have made most of the contributions since then.
Phew, western civilisation made in Scotland and later donkeyed by jews ;)
How can you compare pioneers such as Adam Smith to anybody?
There is a difference between being a student and a teacher, just the same way a leader could not be compared to a follower. So I still don’t get where this “Jewish Civilisation” comes from?
If a programmer produces material for company X, he has no rights to claim such material contribution but the company. So which civilisation has the copyright, cos we can’t have two overlapping ones.
Right wing and Islamophobia do not belong together in the same sentence. Islamophobia is above and beyond the so called left-right, liberal-conservative, moderate-fascist, or whatever spectra. This is because Islamophobia attracts people from all spheres of society. Some of the fiercest Islamophobes I have met are socially liberal at heart whilst believing in a multicultural society and deploring racism. They say that the doctrine of Islam is fascist and goes against everything what liberalism stands for. These are the sort of people who will support Geert Wilders but not the BNP.
The communists in the Soviet Union also held a grudge towards Islam and tried to eradicate it from their territory. I suspect that the far left parties in Britain dominated by humanists and atheists hold an equally big grudge against Islam as the Soviet communists did. Do they really want to live in a country governed by Sharia law? No, but they could take advantage of the Iraq war to use Muslims to put them in power then turn against them in the future. Their plan has probably failed.
Are there Muslim libertarians?? If so, I’m yet to meet one.
Libertarian is best described as simultaneously socially liberal and economically capitalist. Almost the opposite of Islamic doctrine which is best described as socially conservative combined with its own economic and legal system.
The only libertarians I have encountered who follow a religion are liberal Jews, Hindus, and Protestants who are only religious on a Sunday morning.
well,well,well. Look what he have here: Tony Blair calls on world to wage war on militant Islam
Understandably, this has been a hit today in the islamophobes blogosphere.
Sami, have you checked out the Minaret of Freedom Institute? (Oh and they also have a blog).
Gess, here’s how I’d classify civilizations:
Western Civilization 1.0 - Ancient Greece and Rome Western Civilization 2.0 - Medieval and early modern Christendom Western Civilization 3.0 - Industrial and post-industrial Western world
Islamic Civilization 1.0 - Arab caliphates Islamic Civilization 2.0 - Ottomans/Safavids/Mughals Islamic Civilization 3.0 - ?????
“Phew, western civilisation made in Scotland and later donkeyed by jews ;)
How can you compare pioneers such as Adam Smith to anybody?” I didn’t compare anybody to anybody. Adam Smith wasn’t a pioneer. Montaigne, Newton, Locke, Montesquie- you could claim these as pioneers of the enlightenment, but they worked in different fields and individually. The explosion of thought in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century which changed the way people thought about everything and which has affected all thought after that either as inspiration or reaction and all society too was made by a small group of men who knew one another well and influenced and encouraged one another directly. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the most influential thinkers in philosophy, sciences, social sciences, music, literature, art had an astonishingly high proportion of jews. One of them, Freud, compared the human mind to what Rome would be like if the city ahd been biolt with every builing still extant and actually constructed on the buildings of the previous era. Civilisations are much like that- for what is a civilisation but a way of thinking expressed in the way people live?-: what is underneath comes from a great many sources, but what has been produced in the last three hundred years, which is different in kind from anything that went before, is heavily dependent on Scots and jews. The Scots to begin the change, the jews to carry it through.
“Some of the fiercest Islamophobes I have met are socially liberal at heart whilst believing in a multicultural society and deploring racism. They say that the doctrine of Islam is fascist and goes against everything what liberalism stands for.” Except that they aren’t islamophobes. Their dislike of islam is perfectly rational and soundly-based. You’ll have to find another term for them.
A few problems with your classification of civilisation, GC: for one thing there were other European civilisations contemporaneous with Greece and Rome- most notably the Celts and Germanic tribes and the “barbarians” who took over from Rome. Many European political institutions and Britias law derive from the latter. Greece at least- in philosophy and science- had a heavy effect on muslim civilisation, which also affected European civilisation- do we count the Greek influence on European civilisation as coming directly or through muslim civilisation, for example? Equally, muslim civilisations were heavily influenced by other previous civilisations- most obviously Arabic, but also judaism and christianity and Persian, Indian and others that were conquered by muslims. Finally, “Western Civilization 3.0 - Industrial and post-industrial Western world” involved a change in the way people thought and the way they looked at the world and the universe which was completely different to any previous civilisation. It’s a difference in kind. It’s a change- transformation- that contimues and increases at a steadily growing rate.
The “thinkers” you mentioned such as Freud and I guess Marx is what you have in mind were all influenced by Charles Darwin; simple. Freud’s work is simply a study of human-animal behaviour esp his works on the sexual desires of man and consumerism.
Marx instead, just feared the idea of “strongest survives” and had countered it with a kibbutzy ideology which is now thankfully laid to rest.
“Freud’s work is simply a study of human-animal behaviour esp his works on the sexual desires of man and consumerism.” No it isn’t. The important thing about it here though is the enormous influence it had on the way people think.
“Marx instead, just feared the idea of “strongest survives” and had countered it with a kibbutzy ideology which is now thankfully laid to rest.” No he didn’t. Nor was he “influenced by Charles Darwin”. He regarded Darwin as working in exactly the same way as himself in a different field. Would you explain the influence of Darwin on- say- Einstein, Schoenberg, Feynmannn, Kraus, Wittgenstein, Proust, Popper or Haber?
I’m not sure what happened to Charles, but it was something rather remarkable. It used to be that you could count on him to be a most fire-breathing member of the anti-Islamic blogosphere. I have a couple of ideas as to what may have occurred, however:
1) The collapse of the U.S. Republican party in the 2008 election as well as the party’s continued drift not only rightward, but into religious territory that is unacceptable to someone as secular as Charles. In this, he’s rather late to the game. My father is conservative and secular and he’d had enough of the GOP (“Grand Old Party” - another name for the Republicans) by 2004.
2) Another thing that is clear in reading Charles’ posts is that somehow, somewhere it became abundantly clear to him that his anti-Islamic fellow travelers were genocidally inclined. He’s flat-out said it in his posts that some of the people he used to run with want to destroy every Muslim on the face of the earth—and that is unacceptable to him.
Don’t get me wrong. Charles is still very conservative, he still thinks Obama is bad for the USA (although he applauded the rescue of the captain a few weeks back and gave credit to Obama) but he also thinks the GOP is going down the tubes because the people running it are bound and determined to turn it into a regional (Southern), religious (Christian) party, and, as I said above, that’s unacceptable to a secular Californian like Charles.
3) Charles still has an anti-Islamic streak to him, but he’s willing to call stupid what it is. He directed his lizardoid followers to a piece about alleged “FBI” “spy” and known con artist Craig Monteilh a couple of days ago. Some of his followers were confused, but, Charles’ point is clear—do it right, do it legal or don’t do it at all. You can agree or disagree, but I think a few years ago he would have been cheerleading for the FBI and willing to overlook all the operational stupidity in his war to “get Islam.”
Yes, I occasionally drop into LGF, mostly for the jaw-dropping value. I still remember when he had a link to where you could send a pizza to the Israeli Defense Force. That link is gone. He’s changed a lot.
something you may find of interest http://www.blogtalkradio.com/J.....ags-Stupid